CHAPTER 10 219 A ‘Symphony of Britain at War’ or the ‘Rhythm of Workaday Britain’? Len Lye’s When the Pie Was Opened (1941) and the musicalisation of warfare. Anita Jorge 220 SOUNDINGS Introduction ‘Do you think that modern war has no music? That mechanisation has banished harmony, and that because her life is for the moment so grim Britain no longer thinks of singing? What an error’ (Jennings, 1942, p. 1). These words, taken from Humphrey Jennings’s treatment of his ‘sonic documentary’ Listen to Britain, made in 1942 and sponsored by the British Ministry of Information, are emblematic of the wartime offcial discourse that postulated the intrinsic musicality of the sounds of warfare. Offcial discourses on sound were not new: they had started to develop in the inter-war period in reaction to the emergence of new kinds of noise that came to be associated with the advent of ‘modern civilisation’. As extensively shown by James Mansell (2016), during the war, the debate broadened out to become a matter of national well-being, and above all, social cohesion. Positing that a discrete collection of sounds possessed an intrinsic musicality was part and parcel of the offcial propaganda discourse aimed at rationalizing the unknown and controlling the fears of civilians. It implied that something as chaotic and unfathomable as the sounds of warfare was actually driven by a sense of purpose and harmony, and that Britons were ‘pulling together’ in the war effort to the sound of a ‘national symphony’ across social and geographical divides. It was also a way of reassuring the people by maintaining the illusion that there existed an organised and systematic retaliation to enemy attacks. As a result, such phrases as the ‘symphony of war’, the ‘melody’ of the guns, the ‘tones’ of the cannons, or the ‘score’ played by bombers were commonplace in government- sponsored documentaries. The most famous example of this idea is Humphrey Jennings’s Listen to Britain, produced in 1942 by the Crown Film Unit under the aegis of the Ministry of Information. It is built around a collage of ordinary sounds made by the people of Great Britain at the height of the Blitz, which, ‘blended together in one great symphony’1, emerge above the sounds of the enemy. The flm was even built with an ear to the symphonic form — a device that was imitated by several of his contemporaries. A substantial number of documentary flms sponsored by the government during the war concurred in suggesting that, diverse though the sounds of the nation at war were, they formed a coherent whole, an organised work of art, which was the manifestation of the people’s unity. A ‘Symphony of Britain at War’ 221 Certain documentaries, however, were also a feld for formal sonic experimentation, and, due to the intrinsic polysemy of sound, appeared as a conduit for criticism against political power. This was especially true in the case of expatriate artists — a majority of whom were German or Hungarian refugees — whose ideas about the musical properties of sound were highly infuenced by the Soviet school. This paper will focus on one such documentary, When the Pie Was Opened, made in 1941 by New Zealand- born flmmaker Len Lye, under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Information. When the Pie Was Opened: a ‘symphony of Britain at war’?2 After moving from New Zealand to London in 1926, where he had become a member of the London Film Society and an artist associated with the Seven and Five Group, Leonard Charles Huia Lye, also known as Len Lye, began making commercial spots for the GPO Film Unit. This gave him the fnancial and technical means to perfect his technique of the hand-painted flm.3 When the war broke out, Len Lye went on to produce several documentaries for the Crown Film Unit, as the GPO was renamed after it was transferred to the Films Division of the Ministry of Information. When the Pie Was Opened was the third of seven flms that Lye made for the Ministry of Information,4 and the frst that he directed in collaboration with sound recordist Ernst Meyer, a German refugee whose leftist political allegiances (he belonged to the German Communist Party) led to his activities being monitored by MI5 throughout the war. The subject matter of When the Pie Was Opened is rather simple: the flm deals with wartime rationing, and how to make a vegetable pie in the absence of meat. It is set in a country house and features what appears to be a middle-class family, composed of a little girl, bored and longing for ‘blackbird pie’ (from the famous nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, on which most of the flm’s imagery and script are based5), her mother (set on making a vegetable pie, whose recipe she reads from a newspaper clipping) and her father. It was commissioned by the Ministry of Food and produced by the Realist Film Unit, an offshoot of the Crown Film Unit, which mainly produced instructional flms, and for which Len Lye had gained several jobs during the war. All the actors are non-professional, as was the case in many GPO documentaries made during the war. The flm corresponds to Grierson’s defnition of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (1933, pp. 7 – 9) — actuality being in this case the shortage of food during wartime, and the creative aspect of its treatment being the scripted and ‘story’ aspect of it. 222 SOUNDINGS But despite the austerity of its subject matter, the flm is extravagantly surreal and experimental, mainly due to its audacious sound effects. The whole documentary works according to the principle of asynchronicity and aural counterpoint — as theorized by Russian flmmakers Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov in their 1928 joint manifesto (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, & Alexandrov, 1928). The sequence that is most emblematic of this aesthetic is the pie-baking sequence. Indeed, it is built around a collage of sound effects, including the clank of factory machinery as well as the cackling of farmyard birds as the mother chops the vegetables, the lapping of waves and the cry of seagulls as the water boils, the sounds of sawing wood and hammering as the pie crust is indented, that of a train puffng as the mother brings the pie to the table, and the sound of marching orders and stomping feet as she collects the vegetables. Moreover, the sequence is characterized by the recurring voice of a woman reading the recipe aloud and giving the mother cooking instructions — or rather orders — to the accompaniment of a series of military drum rolls, and whose mouth surrealistically emerges from the newspaper clipping on which the recipe is written6 (Figures 1 & 2). This contrapuntal sound collage epitomises the aesthetics of the origins of the word symphony,7 that sounding together of all people across social classes, all contributing in their own way to the war effort. That the baking and serving of a pie by a civilian at home should be accompanied by marching orders, soldiers parading, drum rolls and bugle calls (especially the famous ‘mess call’, traditionally signalling mealtime to soldiers, played on the bugle when the pie is cooked and the table is laid8), could be seen as a direct illustration of the ‘pulling together’ principle. Keeping in line with propaganda principles, the feminine voice giving ‘marching orders’ to the mother in the kitchen could be that of Britannia herself, guiding her people throughout the ordeals of wartime. The distant rumble of war Surprisingly enough, the war itself is never directly mentioned or heard in the flm — it is only hinted at through visual or aural symbols, including trivial sounds that seem strangely ominous. This is not an altogether unusual device in wartime flms — several of Humphrey Jennings’s flms made for the Ministry of Information, such as Listen to Britain (1942) and The Silent Village (1943), do not overtly show civilians under direct enemy assault. Moreover, the enemy is neither seen nor heard in the former, and merely heard in the latter. But war is nevertheless omnipresent: we see RAF airplanes streaking the sky; armoured cars careering down the streets; and soldiers on leave at the ballroom, in the case of Listen to Britain. A ‘Symphony of Britain at War’ 223 Figure 1: ‘Take the season’s vegetables . ’ When the Pie Was Opened (Lye, 1941), 04:09 © British Film Institute Figure 2: ‘About one pound in all . ’ When the Pie Was Opened (Lye, 1941), 04:32 © British Film Institute 224 SOUNDINGS But war does not directly feature in When the Pie Was Opened9. The flm opens with a trumpet melody on the radio (which is later revealed to be the opening to the song ‘Solitude’ composed by Duke Ellington and sung by Louis Armstrong), played against the background of a sky seen through a dotted curtain, as though ridden with bombs, which recalls the wail of an air raid siren — typically heard in contemporary instructional shorts. In a later sequence, the little girl’s father, sitting at a table with a crown on his head, drops a plate containing a slice of pie. The plate crashes down to the ground and breaks into pieces with a sound that would no doubt have been associated by audiences with that of a bomb. As well as being shown at traditional theatre screenings, instructional flms were channeled through non- theatrical distribution, organised by the GPO’s mobile units, in factory canteens, social clubs, and village halls, and fnanced by the Ministry of Information. By 1941, people across the country were well aware of what an air raid typically sounded like, even if they were not direct eye (or ear) witnesses of the confict.